A Productive Week (In London Town)

13/02/2016

Between 17 January and 24 January I was in London with my company. For the first three days, 18-20 January, we attended DGI located at QEII. This was the view from behind our booth at the conference.

Westminster abbey is breathtaking at sunrise. On the second day of the conference, I indulged my inner Wikipedian and went out to the local Sainsbury's and got some stroopwafels. For those of you who don't know, stroopwafels are the unofficial food of Wikipedia after we were given so many at Wikimania 2014.

At night, I was able to wander the City of London, Westminster and Soho. One of those nights, I met up with a good friend of mine, Tom Morris, and his boyfriend for dinner. It was very nice to see him again and to meet his partner.

On 21 January, we journeyed up to Cambridge for a round of meetings with IBM's I2 team.

They were very productive and I was able to visit one of the colleges of Cambridge University.

On the 22nd, we had a free day and became tourists. We let my boss choose two things to do. So that morning, we went to a map store and to the British Library to see their map collection. To do this, we all needed to get Reader Cards. I am still unsure when I will never need to use it again.

For some unknown reason, that may have been influenced by the fact that I have been in London before, I was put in charge of our afternoon. I chose to put our small group on the Thames Clipper down to the Emirates Cable Car. It started out a traditionally dreary British afternoon.

However, by the time we reached Isle of the Dogs, the rain had stopped and it turned out to be a lovely day.

The aftermath of the rain made it impossible to take any pictures on the Cable Car, but it was a great view to see again. On our way back in towards the City of London, I took this stunning picture of Tower Bridge right about sunset.

We got off the clipper at tower bridge and everything seemed right in the world.

We were supposed to fly out on the 23rd but a blizzard hit the Eastern US so we were stuck in London for an extra day, darn. This let me accidentally wander into Chelsea and see cars that I could never afford to drive.